Anthony Burke

Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the End of IR:

Planet Politics is about rewriting and rethinking International Relations as a set of practices, both intellectual and organisational. We use the polemical and rhetorical format of the political manifesto to open a space for inter-disciplinary growth and debate, and for thinking about legal and institutional reform. We hope to begin a dialogue about both the limits of IR, and of its possibilities for forming alliances and fostering interdisciplinarity that can draw upon climate science, the environmental humanities, and progressive international law to respond to changes wrought by the Anthropocene and a changing climate.

Nuclear Reason: At the Limits of Strategy

Is nuclear strategic reason rational? Barack Obama’s April 2009 speech looking towards a world free of nuclear weapons appeared to promise positive new directions in global disarmament and non-proliferation. Yet it came on the heels of one of the most destabilising periods in global nuclear security since the early 1980s. This article argues that the growing interpenetration of nuclear and conventional conflict, and the dangers of nuclear terrorism, provide disarmament with compelling security logic. However, progress will hinge on key states adopting nuclear postures that reduce nuclear dangers and can acknowledge the fundamental impossibility of nuclear strategy as a system of reason: one that has never been able to connect nuclear means and security ends in a way that is either viable or legitimate. In an era of radically asymmetric conflict and competition, disarmament is an imperative, but to succeed it must find a rational way through strategic irrationality.

Questions of Community: Australian Identity and Asian Change

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudds 2008 proposal for an Asia-Pacific community, while ambitious and likely to be resisted by many in the East Asian region, raises important concerns about Asias regional architecture at a time of profound change and challenge from economic uncertainty, human insecurity, environmental problems and intrastate conflict. This article examines how historic Australian and Asian discourses of identity have shaped Asian–Australian relations and how identity discourses now interact with profound contemporary struggles over the pace and direction of normative and institutional change, as exemplified by struggles over the ASEAN Charter or approaches to Burma. One key to this process of change will be how the region defines ‘community’ in both ideational and institutional terms. Will it be people- or elite-centred? Will it be exclusivist and conservative, or open and cosmopolitan? The article critiques older discourses that conceived Australian identity as radically different from Asia and Asian identity as homogenous and anti-Western, arguing that these enabled repressive forms of politics at home and hobbled the ability of the region to grapple collectively with new challenges and insecurities abroad. It argues for homogenising and egoistic models of identity to be abandoned in favour of a more pluralist and cosmopolitan orientation – a new vision of ‘unity in diversity’ where there are no civilisations to clash.

Freedom's Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War

This essay analyses the pervasive discourse of freedom mobilised by the US Administration of George W. Bush, locating its roots not only in post-1945 American foreign policy, but in powerful metanarratives of US exceptionalism and destiny and overarching Western concepts of enlightenment, sovereignty, historical progress, reason of state and secular modernity. Hence freedom is revealed not as a set of democratic liberties guaranteed and enabled by the state—as in familiar liberal-humanist accounts—but as a form of license, a series of capacities and powers to make, use and act without constraint. By tracing this onto-technology of freedom through US history, the Cold War and the War on Terror, and considering its functional mirroring by the Islamist threat of the new terrorism, the essay exposes the multiple dangers posed by the aggressive assertion of a simultaneously instrumental and universalising image of historical action and inevitability that rejects any restriction of its powers and any responsibility for their effect. It concludes by speculating upon a recuperated, and fundamentally social, concept of freedom characterised by interdependence, responsibility and contingent action, one that might one day return to freedom the honour of its name.

Security cosmopolitanism: the next phase

‘Security Cosmopolitanism’ was published in 2013 with the hope that it might stimulate a dialogue between traditional and critical security studies around an urgent problem: the globalisation of insecurities faced by human communities and ecosystems, along with the manifest failure of state and collective security structures to prevent or address them. This second article reflects on the very welcome debate the theory has provoked and speculates on what the next phase of research might be. These collective lines of research, without precluding others, could include mapping complex systems of insecurity across a wide range of domains; folding such diagnoses into explorations of how systemic change may be achieved in global security processes and governance; research in affected communities that can map how they experience insecurity and push their perspectives into global action; and reform plans for response systems and governance. In response to the many commentaries, this article also provides a deeper explanation of the posthuman and ecological commitments of the theory, of its ethical strategy, and of its commitment to a redefined idea of security for humanity and the biosphere in the Anthropocene. In particular, it addresses the perceived tension between a normative and universalising ethics, on the one hand, and a global project of governance and responsibility that is immanently political and perceived by some to be elitist, on the other – a project that struggles with the problems of assigning responsibility for systemic and anonymous processes and of representing its human and non-human communities of concern through the abstractions, and power relations, of international organisations and policy.

Ethics and Global Security : A Cosmopolitan Approach

Introduction 1. Paradigms 2. Identity 3. Force 4. Environment 5. Terror 6. Humanitarianism Conclusion

An Introduction to International Relations

Part 1 Introduction: 1. What Is International Relations?. Part 2 Micro-international relations: 2. The Actors. 3. Foreign Policy as the Pursuit of the National Interest. 4. Influences on Foreign Policy-making - The Domestic Environment. 5. Influences on Foreign Policy-making - the International Environment, 6. Means of Achieving Objectives. 7. The Processes of Policy-making. Part 3 Macro-international relations: 8. International Systems. 9. State Systems. 10. Behavioural Systems. 11. System Transformation. Part 4 Micro-macro linkages: 12. The Micro-macro Conceptualisation. 13. Some Other International Relations Conceptualisations. Conclusion. Further Reading. Index.

Humanity After Biopolitics: on the global politics of human being

Against the background of a profound critique of human rights, cosmopolitan universalism and humanistic political agency offered by writers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt and Jenny Edkins, this essay seeks to recover and rethink the figure of humanity. Arguing that the critique of biopolitics and sovereignty unwittingly frustrates visions of human dignity and agency that can serve as a resource against its abuses, the essay argues that a vision of interdependent, indebted, and dispersed human being – one that can never be reduced to the ego or subject or an arc of history – is both an undeniable global fact and a normative resource. Conceived as a primary value that should normatively precede and condition (bio)politics, even as it never escapes it, humanity is a system of relations with animals, ecosystems, and physical/cosmic environments which occasions profound collective responsibilities. Always intertwined with the powers and terrors of human capacity and action, such a vision is at once a source of philosophical hope and an endless task of critical political work.

Nuclear politics: beyond positivism

What is it possible to say, or think, about nuclear weapons today? The answer will depend less on what you know than on who you are: on where you are situated, and on what the background rules of memory, discourse and research that shape your community’s understanding of the nuclear problem are. Are you Russian, American, or Iranian? Are you a strategist in the Department of Defense or a Washington DC beltway think tank, or a Marshall Islander or Navajo native American struggling with the legacy of testing and mining? In a small way, this special issue of Critical Studies on Security aims to highlight the discursive architectures, and the material stakes, of the politics of knowledge around nuclear weapons. This politics was brought home to me, once again, in New York City a year before this issue went to press. Over the course of a long conversation with one of the contributors, someone who has moved between government, think tanks and academia, they remarked that nuclear disarmament remains an almost unspeakable notion in the United States. At best, it is not seen as geopolitically realistic or germane to US national security; at worst, its concerted advocacy would be damaging to one’s career. My eyes flared in surprise; as believable as it was, it still seemed shocking. Did not the US President give a speech in a European capital evoking a world, many decades hence, without nuclear weapons? (Obama 2009) Had not four former US leaders – the so-called ‘gang of four’ – made a similar call and their voices been joined by numerous former cabinet members, generals and political leaders? (Burke 2009, 507, 511; Schultz and Goodby 2015) How could the think tanks and university schools, known for their hundreds of leading thinkers on strategic and security affairs, be so far behind? My disbelief was enhanced by the ironic fact that, earlier that day, I had been sitting in the United Nations Headquarters on the East River watching diplomats debate during the ninth Review Conference (or ‘Revcon’) on the Treaty on the NonProliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which includes the core Article VI committing its member states to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to the cessation of the arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament’. At the very least, this centrepiece of the global regime governing nuclear weapons ought to mean that disarmament – however complex or politically fraught – should be seen as part of the American nuclear real. Yet the remaining weeks of the review conference bore out the ghostly quality of disarmament in global nuclear politics: a vast gulf separated those many states who are so frustrated by the slow pace of disarmament that they are promoting new legal mechanisms (the ‘effective measures’ of Article VI) to ban nuclear weapons, and those nuclear weapons states and their allies who maintain that disarmament must remain a faltering, incremental process

Nuclear time: temporal metaphors of the nuclear present

This article contributes to a critical project of nuclear scholarship by examining the phenomenon of nuclear time. It does so in two ways. First, it develops an understanding of time as a metaphor that gives shape to our understandings, and performances, of nuclear policy, history and practice. These metaphors have a metaphysical cast, and work in two broad genres – discourses of continuity and recurrence, and of progress and evolution. Second, it develops an alternative, ‘materialist’ understanding of nuclear time that emerges from the weapons themselves and the aporetic nature of the strategies, and governance systems, that have been created to utilise and contain their potential for devastation. It suggests that the actuality of nuclear destruction, and its ability to annihilate human time as such, puts confident metaphors of nuclear time into profound question. This finally opens up a more compelling image of nuclear time, ‘responsibility-in-time’, which demands a futural responsibility to eliminate nuclear harms that can last the true duration of nuclear time, one that is many times longer than Homo sapiens has walked the earth.